The Washington Post has an excellent editorial about The Choice on North Korea:
Here's how we'd sum it up: Mr. Kerry faults Mr. Bush for undoing the diplomacy of the Clinton administration with respect to North Korea and intends to respond by undoing, in turn, what has been accomplished by President Bush.
... The Clinton team painstakingly negotiated a deal under which North Korea supposedly froze its nuclear program and international inspectors monitored its known supply of spent nuclear fuel rods. North Korea received energy supplies from the West, and at the end of 2000, U.S. and North Korean officials were discussing a larger bargain concerning its weapons programs.
... President Bill Clinton's deal with North Korea collapsed after Pyongyang was caught cheating: While "freezing" its plutonium, it was secretly pursuing another bomb program based on enriched uranium. ... [D]espite an overall diplomatic stalemate the Bush administration has succeeded in persuading China -- a neighbor that arguably has more leverage over North Korea than the United States -- to join a five-nation alliance that commonly seeks disarmament. It is this innovation that Mr. Kerry would undo. He says he would return to the bilateral negotiations pursued by the Clinton administration.
Mr. Kerry says his strategy would make room for China, too. But Mr. Bush's prediction is probably right: As soon as the United States agrees to bilateral talks, the North Korean regime will refuse further sessions of the "six party" negotiations that have been underway, relieving China, South Korea, Japan and Russia of responsibility for pressuring Pyongyang and leaving the United States to make a deal alone. Lacking the tools of China -- which controls North Korea's energy supplies and could cause its regime to collapse simply by loosening border controls -- the United States would once again face the choice of offering distasteful bribes to a murderous dictatorship or threatening an almost unthinkable war. Mr. Bush doesn't have a good record on North Korea, but he has mapped a possible way out of this difficult bind -- assuming, that is, that a diplomatic solution is possible. Apart from purely partisan motivations, Mr. Kerry's rejection of it makes little sense.
I've had two different people say the exact same thing to me about Kerry's inconsistent position on North Korea (inconsistent in that while Kerry wants multilateralism everywhere else, he wants uni/bilateralism with North Korea): Kerry seems to just reflexively take the opposite position that Bush does.
I found this editorial via David Ellis at Wunderkinder, who writes:
By saying that he will engage North Korea in bilateral negotiations, Senatory Kerry not only eliminates any further 6 party talks until the November election and maybe even next year if Kerry wins, but there is no question that North Korea will cut China out of their negotiating calculus when they achieve their goal of bilateral talks, aka nuclear blackmail. Senatory Kerry simply isn't realistic when he ridiculously asserts that China will remain an impact player in the North Korea negotiations when North Korea has far more negotiating leverage in bilateral talks with the U.S. Why Kerry in practice wants to cut off the only 3rd party nation that has realistic leverage over North Korea is beyond me. Perhaps the Washington Post is correct when its posits that the only reason it can think of is "partisan politics."
So to sum it up, Kerry wants to go back to the failed policies of the Clinton administration with regard to North Korea. My understanding of Clinton's deal with North Korea is slightly different than what the Post indicates, which is that Clinton actually gave North Korea not just energy supplies, but nuclear technology in exchange for promises that they wouldn't use it to build nuclear weapons. Remarkably, that's pretty much the same approach Kerry plans to take with Iran, which is to give Iran nuclear fuel!
In any case, in all this part of me is happy to finally have some specific bits of Kerry's foreign policy to dissect. It took until the month before the election to frickin know where he stood on pretty much anything. Now we know a little, and what we know about his plans shows that they're not good.
Wednesday, October 6, 2004
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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/FJ05Dg02.html